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While respiratory issues such as asthma, pneumonia, etc. are well-known symptoms of the covid 19, a new study published in the journal Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology has found that 4 out of 5 of hospitalized patients experience some kind of neurological manifestation. The researchers carried out the study in 509 patients admitted to a Chicago hospital network and found out that 419 of these patients showed neurological symptoms of coronavirus at some point during their time at the hospital.
The authors wrote in their study that the most frequently occurring neurological symptoms of coronavirus were headaches (experienced by 37.7% patients), dizziness (experienced by 30% of patients), anosmia (loss of smell) (experienced by 11.4% of patients), myalgias, encephalopathy (experienced by 32% of patients), and dysgeusia (impaired sense of taste) (experienced by 16% of patients). Some of the uncommon symptoms were movement disorders, motor, and sensory deficits, seizures, strokes, and ataxia. The average stay in the hospital for these patients was also three times longer than usual and the risk of death was seven times higher.
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The study included data from coronavirus patients admitted across an academic medical center and nine hospitals within the Northwestern Medicine Healthcare system in Chicago between March and April. Moreover, a quarter of those patients required mechanical ventilation. The researchers found that around 42% of the patients, before going to the hospital, had neurological manifestations when they first started experiencing symptoms. Then when they were sick enough to be admitted to the hospital, nearly 63% of them showed neurological symptoms of coronavirus, according to the data.
The researchers also discovered that younger patients were found to be more likely to be impacted by the neurological symptoms of coronavirus than older patients. They wrote that the fact that any neurological manifestations as a whole were more likely to occur in younger people is surprising, and could be explained by greater clinical emphasis on the risk of respiratory failure than other symptoms in older patients, however in contrast encephalopathy was more frequent in older people. Less than 6% of patients in the study were evaluated by neurologists or neurosurgeons, so more research is needed to find out if similar findings would occur in other hospital systems.
Even after these patients left the hospital, many of their symptoms remained. Only around 32% of them were able to complete simple tasks like paying bills or cooking, according to the chief of neuro-infectious disease and global neurology at Northwestern Medicine and senior author of the study Dr. Igor Koralnik.
The study did not specify how the coronavirus can cause encephalopathy, however, Dr. Koralnik believes that encephalopathy is sometimes brought on by other diseases including those that cause changes in blood circulation and inflammation, particularly in older patients. Moreover, a majority of the health experts believe that the covid19 doesn’t attack the brain cells directly but these neurological symptoms are a byproduct of inflammation and immune system responses.
This isn’t the first study of its kind, as a study in April of 214 coronavirus patients discovered that more than one-third of the patients experienced some sort of neurological complications. The virus is capable of causing neurological complications like brain inflammation, nerve damage, delirium, and stroke.
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